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Enter Tess - a wholesome girl who is, of course, very attractive and fiercely independent. She’s a sailor who is intensely competitive and consequently very intimidating. She’s never met a man who has been a match for her. An inadvertent trip to the cemetery finds Tess visiting the cemetery - a cemetery Charlie now works at. (In regular contact with the ghost of his brother, Charlie can see ghosts before they cross over to the great beyond.) Tess is charmed by Charlie’s evidently good looks and his aggressively wholesome personality.

Tess and Charlie hit it off and make a date for him to make her dinner. The night of the date, Charlie has a quick, perfunctory meeting with his little brother before heading off for a romantic evening with Tess. It’s a suitably sweet evening between the two of them. Some time later, she runs into his little brother. The fact that she can see him suggests that something’s wrong - no one can see Sam but Charlie. As it turns out, Tess is, in fact a spirit. Now Charlie and Sam have to acquaint Tess with the idea of being a ghost and exactly what that might entail. Just as she’s begun to come to terms with her situation, Charlie spends one final night with her wherein he has the aforementioned spectral coitus with her, awakening to find that she seems to have left a hint that she might not actually be dead. Thus, he quickly convinces a friend of his to boat him out to an outcropping of rock where they find her nearly dead. Yes, they DO take her back to a hospital. Yes, she IS alive - in a coma. In the process of saving her life, Charlie missed his first night with Sam since his death. Sam moves on and things get weird. Now he’s an angel overlooking Sam, helping him to find Tess. Years later, she’s out of the coma and she remembers everything. It’s kind of an anti-climactic ending…

The Movie

The film opens with Charlie and Sam sailing. Played by reasonably charming, young screen actor Zac Efron, Charlie is seen winning a sailing race in high school with his little brother Sam (Charlie Tahan.) Okay, so I might’ve zoned-out during some of Sherwood’s gratuitous folksiness, but I’m pretty certain that Charlie wasn’t a terribly big boater in the book. The film gives Charlie a major sailing obsession and something to really sink into beyond working at the cemetery and hanging out with ghosts.

The boating obsession also gives Charlie some common ground with Tess (played here by Amanda Crew.) This compromises things a bit. First off, in the novel, with sailing, he’s entering her world. The fact that they both have a love of sailing in common does make the romance that much more believable, but it makes Charlie’s journey towards opening up with Tess seem that much less dangerous to him.

The film allows Efron to portray a much more charismatic Charlie than the one in the book. A guy absolutely obsessed with his dead brother and little else - a man who works at a cemetery and talks to dead people makes for a far darker figure than the one Efron’s given to play here, but with less darkness comes greater complexity. The exact particulars of the accident that caused Sam to die, while not that dissimilar to those in the book, shift around the darkness. The accident happens after a brief fight between the two. The film paints a considerably more nuanced, considerably less idealized relationship between the brothers than the one rendered by Sherwood. There are more overt shades of animosity between the brothers that surface even after Sam’s death. It makes for a much more tolerably realistic dynamic between the brothers.

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